


On Golden Sands

by zetsubonna



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Star Wars Setting, Cooking, Force Bond (Star Wars), M/M, Marooned, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Reunions, Self-Indulgent, self-care
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-06
Updated: 2017-01-06
Packaged: 2018-09-15 05:33:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9221243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zetsubonna/pseuds/zetsubonna
Summary: ❤︎ for Elysia ❤︎Steve is so salty, Sam can feel it across space.





	

Sam wanted a break. The Rebellion had some victories under its belt and the Empire was shivering like a harpooned leviathan. So he'd turned his considerable experience as an astromech programmer and his mysterious ability to acquire currency into a little hard earned time off. Picking up some Imperial paper pusher's abandoned private hyperspace shuttle when the poor sucker had disappeared was thrifty and fair game. Sam didn't really care if the previous owner had died on Scarif or the Death Star. He cared that his ship, Redwing, and his autopilot droid, Arfour, were indistinguishable from each other after Sam's considerable retooling, the sleeping quarters were easily renovated into something comfortable, and the hyperdrive was already mostly intact.

So Sam left, and he hadn't been back to Pamarthe in months. He'd meant to be back by now, but he kept having this feeling that someone behind him was annoyed. Once he noticed the feeling in his periphery, he couldn't help picking it up whenever it flared, a feeling of irritation and frustration strong enough to be sensed through the Force. The death of the Jedi hadn't been the end of Force sensitivity, nor was theirs the only kind that worked. For Sam, empathy had come easily as breathing since he was a kid, and whomever this was, they hovered right at the edge of Sam's consciousness. He didn't know where the feeling was coming from, but if Sam could sense it, so could anyone else who happened to be Force sensitive.

Either he was really out in the dark spots of the Outer Rim, or the irritated sentient was being ignored on purpose by others passing through. He couldn't get a handle on that, either. For Sam, who had learned to mostly ignore the feelings of other sentients as a matter of course, this particular feeling he sensed was strong, persistent, and evasive, like a mosquito in an otherwise loud room that kept zipping back into hearing range, just enough to catch his attention and then gone again before it could be seen or squashed.

Sam wasn't even sure how he knew it was one person. He just knew. That person felt familiar, too, and he couldn't explain why. Arfour was getting annoyed asking, though the droid had apparently set a cycle to do so at intervals three times a day. Sam was running out of witty retorts. Mostly, he just wanted to be right. Being untrained and having a gift that he largely used to anticipate things his astromechs and pilots would have to deal with and in shady trade negotiations made trying to find a specific person a pain in the ass. It took weeks of combing around, following the flare and fade, before Sam got closer, and followed the feeling like the beacon of a torch in the dark.

When he got to the little habitable moon, Sam noticed first that it felt abandoned. There were other creatures on it, sure, but mostly they were plants, with some creatures in the ocean but nothing that seemed sentient on the surface. The few scant buildings Sam managed to find looked like someone had tried to create a colony there once, and then given up because the location, while beautiful and capable of sustaining sentient life, wasn't profitable or convenient.

It was the kind of hidey-hole Sam was always looking for, minus the ebb and flow of negative emotion. When Arfour brought Redwing down to hover over the not quite crumbled buildings, Sam reflected that they might have had the same rich vacationer's purpose as his ship.

Then a slight, tow-headed man in thick robes that would keep out the breeze came and stood in the doorway, gesturing angrily at the sky, and Sam swore, startled. In less than half an hour, Arfour had landed Redwing, and before Sam could even fully disembark, the blond came pelting across the grassy hill and slammed into him at full speed.

"I thought you'd never get here," Steve growled, interrupting the hug to punch Sam lightly in the back, right over his kidney. "I kept trying to get you to come down."

"How did you know it was me?" Sam asked, trying not to laugh. "I can't be the only guy flying around out here, or you wouldn't be stuck."

"I was looking for you. You feel a certain way," Steve said, frowning when he pulled back to look up at Sam, though he didn't break the hug just yet. "You're always looking for something. I thought maybe it was me."

Sam felt a small pang of guilt, but didn't let it show on his face. "I didn't know to look for you, honestly. I thought you were scouting."

"I was," Steve said, and this time he broke away. "But apparently if you shoot your mouth off more times than your blaster, you get marooned and have to live off fish and whatever passes for the local rodents for a couple of months."

"Apparently," Sam said, biting the inside of his cheek to keep from grinning. "This place they left you in got a decent bed?"

"Do I look like I've been sleeping in a decent bed?" Steve demanded.

Sam sized up his posture. "Yeah, or your back would be killing you."

Steve huffed. "Okay, so the bed isn't terrible. I haven't frozen to death, either, the weather's pretty decent."

"Well, I came for a vacation," Sam said, slinging an arm around Steve's waist. "So how about you feed me, let me see if that bed's better than the one in my ship, and once I've had a chance to enjoy my vacation, I'll think about letting you ride back to civilization with me."

"Or we can just live here," Steve said, grinning up at Sam as they started to walk toward the habitat. "I do okay, for a city boy."

Sam laughed. "It's like that, huh?"

Steve pulled on Sam's shirt until he leaned down enough for a rough kiss.

"Yeah," Steve said, dipping behind Sam's back and shoving him forward when he was done. "It's like that."

* * *

Sam watched as Steve prepared a thick steak of some sort of heavy fish, wondering but knowing better than to ask how he’d managed to reel it in on his own.

“That smells really good,” Sam said instead, still hard-pressed not to laugh at the image of Steve, all sunburned ears and freckled nose, stuck on a backwater near-tropical moon, finding the patience to go fishing.

“I should hope so,” Steve said, sprinkling pink sea salt and some herb Sam couldn’t readily identify over the steak, then flipping it over and adding a squirt of juice from a small, orangey-pink fruit. “I’ve been eating this stuff for weeks.”

“You never cooked for me before,” Sam reminded him, resting his forearms on the edge of the table and letting the grin take over his face. “Didn’t know you knew how.”

“Course I can cook,” Steve said, and Sam noted the sunburn on the back of Steve’s freckled neck was suspiciously redder, like he might be blushing. “I can do all sorts of things.”

“So, let me see,” Sam said, watching Steve’s weight distribution shift on his feet. “Different kinds of holochess, just about any blaster, shield plate design, shield generator programming, kinetic physics engines, combat navigation simulators, protocol droid interfaces, sewing, fishing, skinning, and cooking.”

“Is this funny?” Steve asked over his shoulder, suspicious. “You have a lot of talents, too.”

“It’s attractive,” Sam said, leaning back in his chair, letting his grin settle. “It’s very attractive, that’s all.”

“Mm, well,” Steve said, turning the steak again and checking over it carefully. “Better than an empath mech programmer who can’t even recognize his own boyfriend at a distance.”

“Across space,” Sam said, feigning defensiveness. “Across a lot of space, and in a place I wasn’t looking for you.”

“Mhm,” Steve said, starting to smile a little. “I’m not the one bragging about his Force sensitivity, though.”

“Listen,” Sam said. “Listen, you.”

“I’m listening.” Steve slid the steak on to a small, silvery plate and delivered it to Sam with a fork balanced on the edge. “Listening to you make excuses.”

Sam caught Steve’s wrist and tugged him down to steal a kiss.

“Listen,” Sam said again, before another kiss. “Listen.”

“Eat,” Steve countered. “Finish your dinner and we’ll talk about dessert.”

“I can’t even argue with that,” Sam sighed, letting him go after one last kiss. “Dessert’s you? Or that orange stuff?”

“Depends,” Steve said dryly, “On how much more listening I gotta do.”

“I can live with that,” Sam said, starting to eat his fish.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the Bobby Darin classic, _Beyond the Sea_
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> _Somewhere beyond the sea_  
>  _Somewhere waitin' for me_  
>  _My lover stands_  
>  **on golden sands**  
>  _And watches the ships that go sailin'_


End file.
